After Six Months, Vista Security Exploits Aren't Too Bad
Fri Jun 22, 2007 12:16PM EDT
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Good news on the Vista front. After six months on the market, Microsoft's claims of it being more secure than its prior OSes are proving generally true.
In an analysis of critical or "high severity" security bugs by CSO Online, Vista has been found with a mere 12 problems, all but one of which have been patched. This compares favorably to Windows XP, which had over 20 high-severity bugs in its first six months, and even MacOS X, which had slightly fewer than XP, with 18 critical bugs.
When considering non-critical security bugs, the data is similar. Vista has had a total of 27 reported security bugs vs. XP's 39. Again, all other operating systems (including several flavors of Linux) fared worse.
Microsoft's poor spot in the report relates to those non-critical security holes, virtually none of which have been fixed yet. They will undoubtedly be patched over time, but it's nonetheless disconcerting that these bugs remain. The full report can be found here (PDF link).
Others have expressed skepticism over the report's comparison between Windows and Linux OSes, but the overall claims are at least encouraging. Compared to prior versions of Windows (which is all that Microsoft has ever claimed), Vista truly does appear more secure.
Comments on After Six Months, Vista Security Exploits Aren't Too Bad
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2 Posted by jml4realty on Thu Sep 3, 2009 4:37PM EDT Report Abuse
My daughter has a Ibook that is about 4 - 5 years old. The screen does not show a picture. Apple store said it wasn't worth fixing repair cost about $300 better to buy new. My daughter just wants to use it for her music downloads and photos. She can use my computer for her school work etc. Is it worth fixing for what she wants to use it for? We look forward to your answer and thank you in advance.
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3 Posted by rogueist on Thu Sep 3, 2009 8:49PM EDT Report Abuse
You can buy a refurbished iBook for less than $300 - look around on Google.
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4 Posted by commorancy on Thu Sep 3, 2009 3:28PM EDT Report Abuse
Widespread adoption of Vista has not yet happened primarily due to application incompatibility issues. So, until there is a much wider adoption rate on Vista, I'd say this report is extremely preliminary. Let's revisit this issue in about 1 year from Vista's release date and see just where we are then. I personally believe that there are less vulnerabilities strictly due to lack of widespread adoption of this OS as yet. Once more kids get their hands on it, that issue will likely change. One last thing to consider, Microsoft doesn't have to publish or publicly announce how many bugs are reported or fixed. Open source usually doesn't have much of a choice in this reagard considering most of them use public bug reporting systems.
1 Posted by rogueist on Thu Sep 3, 2009 8:49PM EDT Report Abuse
I'm not quite sure which reports they are using to generate these figures, but they dont jibe with the figures I see weekly from the vulnerability testing labs. Maybe they are only talking about items fixed, not items that actually exist.